With the advent of the Internet, enormous amounts of information have been made accessible via the network to users of all skill levels and backgrounds. This also applies to technological advances in hardware storage systems that facilitate storing large amounts of data (e.g., gigabytes and terabytes) on a user's home computer. Users, both home and professional, are now prone to store anything and everything since the cost to do so is becoming cheaper. Advances in network bandwidth as well as computing bandwidth have facilitates the generation and transmission of all kinds and types of content. In the not too recent past, the content that dominated the Internet was primarily text-based content. However, multimedia content (e.g., audio, video and image content) provides a more rich experience can now be considered dominate all web site content and will be communicated easily to millions of users, thereby making data organization and searching even more difficult. Multimedia content is being provided for access via most any device and system, including fixed and portable computers, cellular telephones, and IP-connected televisions, for example.
Today, multimedia search engines, and image search engines in particular, provide poor user experiences. When a user searches for an image, they are oftentimes trying to find multiple good images and then trying to browse those images. This implies that image search providers should aim to provide a faster route to pages that offer a gallery-like user experience. Moreover, users expect similar browse-oriented behaviors in audio and video searches.
Currently, no search engine properly addresses this problem because none of them place value in the concept of an image or a media gallery (a page dedicated to browsing media).